Tactics that produce immediate results in the world of SEO are hard to come by.
If you’re a small business owner however, there is one technique which a lot of people simply aren’t harnessing. It doesn’t require you to pour over SEO books, scroll through multiple industry-related blogs to learn or hire an SEO professional.
All it requires is a simple shift in thinking, as well as your writing.
Example:
I want to write a blog about making the perfect pizza crust (I don’t really). I sit down, write my piece and finish it up by adding my targeted keywords. Maybe even an image.
The Problem
A lot of people will be writing blogs about pizzas and pizza crusts around the internet, and approximately 99% of them will be using individual keywords and two-word keywords in the posts as meta tags or in the actual copy. These are known as short tail keywords.
Short tail: pizza
Short tail keywords are great, yeah, but go into Google and search “pizza” and you will get about 210,000,000 results. That’s a lot of results – it’s highly likely your post will never see the light of day.
Short tail and mid tail keywords fall into the same category; they’re just not specific enough for people to find your blog organically.
Mid tail keyword: pizza crust
This time, go over to Google and type in “pizza crust”. 12,100,000 results. Okay, you’ve reduced the yield to 5% it once was, but 12 million results is still a big return! You’re still not specific enough.
The Solution
But, the real way to dominate the world of SEO is through long tail keywords.
Long tail keyword: “recipe for best pizza crust”
A search using this long tail keyword yields 2,840,000 results
The lesson: Start thinking outside the box; use a bit of imagination. Start thinking like the guy on the other side of the computer screen. You may think that short tail keyword-targeting is efficient, but this strategy helps.
We’ve also written a blog about SEO for local and smaller-sized businesses you can read here . More strings to your bow!
